Typesafe Scala Software Maker Gets $14M to Boost Stack

By Darryl K. Taft |
Posted 2012-08-23

Typesafe, provider of a Scala-based software stack, announced it closed a $14 million Series B round of funding led by Shasta Ventures.

In addition to the funding, Typesafe appointed Shasta Ventures Managing Director Jason Pressman to its board. Other investors that participated in the new round include Juniper Networks through its Junos Innovation Fund, as well as existing investors Greylock Partners and FranÃ§ois Stieger-a former executive at Verisign, Broadvision and Oracle. The new financing builds upon Typesafe's success, providing for continued development of the Typesafe Stack and company growth.

"Typesafe allows developers to effectively develop robust applications that address the dual challenges of large-scale distributed "cloud computing" applications and massively multicore hardware platforms while still integrating seamlessly with the Java infrastructure," said Jason Pressman, managing director at Shasta Ventures, in a statement. "Founded by the creators of Scala language and Akka middleware, Typesafe has exceptional engineering and management teams and is making meaningful advancements within the software development community."

"Typesafe's success and recognition in the past year has attracted the attention of world-class investors, partners and customers," said Mark Brewer, CEO of Typesafe, also in a statement. "The new financing will enable us to accelerate the delivery of next-generation developer technologies for the enterprise, continue to rapidly grow the company and expand our partner ecosystem."

Jeff Lipton, vice president of venture and strategic investments at Juniper Networks, said the Junos Innovation Fund invests in companies that complement its Junos platform and help extend the Junos ecosystem of applications. "The Typesafe Stack enables us to leverage the most recent advances in large-scale parallel processing and distributed computing while building on existing investments in Java," he said.

Scala is a general-purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive, Typesafe officials said. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language designed as a "better Java." It runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM) and maintains strong interoperability with Java, while at the same time integrating functional programming along with Java's object-oriented programming model. Scala also attempts to clean up some of the issues some developers view as being shortcomings in Java.

The Typesafe Stack, a 100 percent Java-compatible software suite, combines the Akka middleware framework, the Play Web framework and the Scala programming language. A comprehensive platform for building applications in Java and Scala, the Typesafe Stack can scale to the largest workloads in cloud computing and virtualized enterprise data center environments, the company said.

On Aug. 8, Typesafe introduced the Scala Language Integrated Connection Kit (Slick). Slick provides a framework for Scala programmers to easily connect to databases-both relational and NoSQL-and other data sources. It integrates databases into Scala, allowing stored and remote data to be queried and processed in the same way as in-memory data using ordinary Scala classes and collections. This enables full control over when a database access happens and which data is transferred.

Slick provides a front-end layer that integrates queries transparently using ordinary Scala types. As a result, queries can be processed and validated at compile time, even in user-provided database back-ends. Using Slick, programmers can directly write database queries in Scala, benefitting from the static checking, compile-time safety and compositionality of Scala. Slick also allows for writing SQL queries and executing them with an API optimized for Scala instead of using JDBC.

"Slick, the database connector, will enhance the capabilities of Scala in multiple dimensions, including Web, parallel scalability across multiple cores and horizontal scalability across multiple machines," said Michael Azoff, principal analyst with Ovum, in his May 10 blog post. "Typesafe's road map indicates the maturing of Scala."

"With more modern, efficient database query and access capabilities, Slick delivers a powerful framework for Scala programmers," Typesafe's Brewer said. "With the introduction of our new database connector, we are making it even easier for developers to build next-generation distributed applications using Scala."